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An emergency alert is only useful to the people who can receive and understand it. For venues, festivals and sports grounds, that’s not a peripheral concern. It’s the test the Equality Act 2010 applies to every communication you send.
When the UK Government’s national emergency alert test reached millions of phones, it worked for most recipients and failed for some. Deaf users couldn’t hear the siren. Blind users heard a sound they couldn’t read without a screen reader picking up the text. People with cognitive disabilities had seconds to parse a message written in a register designed for the general population, not for them.
Scale that down from a national test to a single venue, and the operational question is sharper. If you had to clear a stand, halt a set, or evacuate a festival field right now, could every disabled customer in your building receive the instruction? Not most of them. All of them.
The reasonable adjustments duty applies to emergency communication
Emergency communication isn’t exempt from the Equality Act 2010. The anticipatory duty means a service provider has to think, in advance, about how disabled customers will receive urgent information. A single-channel alert, sent only by app push or only by tannoy, is a policy that works for some and puts others at a substantial disadvantage. Under the revised EHRC statutory Code in force from 5 August 2026, that’s exactly the kind of blanket practice the Code expects providers to redesign.
The practical standard isn’t perfection. It’s whether you’ve thought through the routes, tested them with disabled users, and documented what you did. A venue that can show it mapped its alert channels, ran an accessible emergency communications review, and trained staff on the exception journey is in a very different position from one that simply assumed the tannoy would be enough.
The full article sets out the multi-channel alert model, the disabled-user testing approach, the staffing and tannoy alternatives, and how this fits the Dynamic Disability Assessment.
The first channel most venues rely on is the public address system. It’s also the one that fails most disabled customers. Tannoy-only alerts exclude deaf and hard-of-hearing attendees entirely unless they’re paired with a visual equivalent, and the register tannoy scripts use is rarely written for comprehension under stress.
The second channel is the app push notification. It assumes the customer has the app, has notifications on, has battery, and can read the screen. For a blind customer using a screen reader, an alert that arrives as an unlabelled image or a wall of unstructured text is not an alert. It’s a barrier.
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The full article sets out the multi-channel alert model, disabled-user testing, tannoy and staffing alternatives, and how accessible emergency communication fits the Dynamic Disability Assessment.
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Disability access consultant and Equality Act 2010 specialist. CEDR-accredited mediator. Founder of Strategic Access Consulting. Experience in Court of Appeal and Supreme Court cases, contributions to House of Lords and Commons Select Committee proceedings.
This article provides general legal and operational information and isn’t legal advice. For organisation-specific guidance, contact us.